LinkedIn just added a new “applications” feature that allows users to add certain applications to their profiles. According to the LinkedIn blog:

The eight applications that you see live today on LinkedIn include productivity enhancing applications from Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit, and WordPress as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn. Each of these applications will help you stay current and competitive as a professional in today’s rapidly changing business world.

This announcement is very timely. We gave a presentation to the Mass. Society of CPA’s today and talked about the applications functionality available on Facebook. This new functionality opens your Facebook profile up a little and allows you to share more information with the professional network you have on LinkedIn.

For example, if your firm has a blog you can now have the posts from your blog automatically flow through to your LinkedIn profile. Once you setup the initial connection everything else is automatic.

Here is the video that accompanied the official announcement:

Do you know what RSS feeds are? According to Wikipedia RSS feeds are:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

Is that any clearer? No? We did not think so either. Try watching the video below for a very clean explanation of what RSS feeds do and how you can use them.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what RSS feeds are and how they are used, you can subscribe to our feed.

Martha Stewart recently announced that her blog is moving from Typepad to Wordpress. We develop a lot of sites with Wordpress and it is great to see such a high visibility site being powered by the platform we love and recommend every day.

Visit: The Martha Blog : Blog upgrade news!

One a related note, Rhea from the The Gemini Web was one of the first people to comment on Martha’s post about the transition. Rhea is a client and a phenomenal blogger and it is great to bump into her in the Blogosphere.

Did you know that Google has a ton of free tools available to help your non-profit organization? The site also features ideas and tutorials that will help you use Google tools to promote your work, raise money and operate more effeciently.

Our personal favorites:

• Accept online donations without any transaction fees until 2009 using Google Checkout.
• Apply for free advertising through the Google grants program. This can help raise awareness of your organization and generate traffic for your website.

Learn more: Google for Non-Profits.

The fine folks at designm.ag shared a list of 20 great page analysis tools that you can use to evaluate your webpages and their search friendliness.

Check out the list at the link below.

20 Free Page Analysis Tools.

According to them: “When developing and maintaining websites, analysis plays a significant role in maximizing the effectiveness of the site. There are a number of resources and tools for analyzing web pages, and this post looks at 20 of the best free tools for this purpose. Almost all of them require no account or download to be used.”